Insulating a wall

[Man at B&Q]

Rubbish. I've done 6 and three doors now, all with ancilliary bits easily obtained as a non-trade customer.

MBQ

[The Natural Philosopher]

I have to agree. Niece bought an old commercial property. One whole line of windows had zero lintels beyond a rotting 4x2, and that wall needed thousands of pounds of underpinnning. HUGE cracks inside. I blame the large willow tree..plus the 6" deep strip foundations of 70's vintage. Yes, its should not have been possible to do such crap work even then..

Thats when the building inspector becomes someone you are glad exists..

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yup.

rather like me discussing with a groundman how much it would cist to hire a minidigger to do 15 foot of trenchwork for a run of soil pipe: 'I can do that in 4 hours for less than he will charge you, with a spade'

He was right.

Sadly te BCO requires fans, whether you have a window or not.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That's just software..

[stuart noble]

Well, good for you. I don't happen to have a local source for the various trims they use to finish the job off neatly so, as a handyman, I wouldn't take on that kind of work. Is that rubbish?

[The Medway Handyman]

I won't get involved at all Phil, I'll just tell them its best they get a window put in. I don't know antone in the game.

[neverwas]

Thank you (and John). I'll read yet more. And probably end up even more confused. (Eg I see now that Kingspan say you can use dot and dab with their K18 but that they don't recommend it with solid brick walls which can be penetrated by rain . Heh ho: it's all a good excuse for manana-ism.)

[Huge]

Have a look at

It generates throwaway email addresses on the fly, so you give these websites an email address like [e-mail], which you can read via the web site for 24 hours.

[andrew]

This thread has lost me a bit. I thought solid brick walls needed to breathe a bit.I can see that hacking off the internal plaster and nailing on battens then rigid foam will give a small breathing space but so will dot and dab, also this air space isn't ventilated so what happens if damp ever does get to the wall surface?

With the amount of foil backed celotex I see discarded as sizable offcuts on sites that I visit I'm sorely tempted to start a collection to see if I could panel the inside of my solid walls but it would depend on fixing them directly to the exposed brick, taping the joints and then using lining paper. I brought home a 1.5m by 0.6m piece tonight ;-).

AJH

[BigWallop]

A piece of the sizes you have picked up, is a rubbish bin job. An off-cut is something that is 6' X 3' size. It's pointless playing around with little bits off the edge of a full board.

[andrew]

This bit will make the beginnings of a retained heat cooker for dried beans.

AJH

[BigWallop]

Hey. Well done. If you have use for it, then go with it.

Is there a market for them?

[AJH]

No because where people need them they cannot afford them and here energy is so cheap that they're not used. The army still use something similar to carry hot food to the battlefield (a Norwegian?). The thing is things like dried beans (after soaking for 24hrs) need only boiling and then kept at ~80C for a long period, I don't really know enough about cooking other than that meat needs to get above 70C to ensure pathogens are killed, so I don't know why this time is necessary, some sort of hydrolysis perhaps?

Anyway I've made a couple of visits to an arts project which aims to demonstrate renewable energy and cooking. I've built them a stove which can burn hot and fast on demand but they then need a means of keeping things hot. If I can build a number of layers of celotex with circular cut outs into which their various posts sit I can cut fuel use. More importantly because my stove uses a laptop fan to supply air I need a renewable means of charging my gel cell (which is in one of those portable car starter things, cw compressor, cigar lighter sockets and fluorescent light). Then we might light the horse trailer in which everything is supposed to happen (apart from my stove which must stay outside) with some high intensity leds which I have been offered.

Current on site generation is a lady's bicycle with the back wheel off the ground driving an electric scooter motor via friction and running into 2 one farad capacitors then a 12V battery. I've not tried it yet neither have I seen anyone generating with it in the short visits I've made!

AJH

[stuart noble]

Celotex prevents warm air reaching the brick, so there is no condensation, and therefore nothing that needs air circulation to dry. Suffocation :-)

[AJH]

OK then why not dot and dab? Fixing battens is more work and potentially more total depth required, I'm already bound to lose 50mm on two sides of this room.

AJH

[sm_jamieson]

Dot and dab can use nearly as much space as a batten. Usually dot and dab is specified with a bit of an air gap - which contributes to the U value of the wall. I assumed they think dot and dab adhesive would fail if the damp comes through from outside. You can fix direct to wall mechanically without battens. Obviously this creates some cold bridging. I mechanically fixed cement board / celotex to the wall using frame anchors, since I did not want to lose space (in bathroom). Effectively making one side of the wall impermeable and colder (not heat from inside) can in theory make the bricks damper, since evaporation may be removed. I suspect this is not much of a problem in reality. Simon.

[Man at B&Q]

The trims are a bodge to cover up not doing the job properly in the first place, and are totally unneccessary. They are, however, easily available from Wickes.

So yes, still rubbish to me.

MBQ

[BigWallop]

:-) From your descriptions and instructions. Are you sure there isn't market for them all? If you need help in working out pricing for all these bits and pieces you construct, give me a shout. :-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Meat at 70c is largely ruined.

40-60c is more usual.

If you play with steak for example, its tender raw (if good), rapidly toughens on cooking, and only re-tenderises after prolonged boiling.

I use the cheapeset steak for pies and casseroles, and give it at least a couple of hours around 90c.

Sounsd a bit like an aga.

[John Rumm]

Traditional dot 'n' dab may have difficulty bonding to the foil face of the ordinary insulating boards, although you can get insulated plasterboard designed for the purpose. Alternatively you can use a board fix expanding foam.

The normal attraction of using battens on top of the foam is you can buy cheap seconds for the foam and ordinary plasterboard at a substantially lower cost than the special to type insulated plasterboards.